In Matthew 8:5-13 we have the account of the Centurion with great faith. Jesus even commented on his faith. BUT Jesus did not tell the Centurion to leave the Roman Legion or call out his military service as something he shouldn’t be doing.
Likewise, in Luke 3:14 we see: “Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?” He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” Again, Jesus had the opportunity to tell the soldiers what they were doing was wrong, but he didn’t. He merely gave them some guide rails to use in their military service. I think that we need to be encouraging qualified Christians to pursue military service. I think we need conscientious Christians providing Christian guide rails to the troops they serve with and for.
Wes, thank you for this thoughtful and gracious article. I deeply appreciate your commitment to following Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence and your respectful tone toward those who serve or have served in the military and law enforcement.
That said, I’m not fully persuaded that Scripture requires Christians to abstain from all roles involving state authority or the use of force. One example that gives me pause is the Philippian jailer in Acts 16. After his dramatic conversion, he is baptized that same night, yet there’s no indication that Paul instructed him to resign his post, even though his duties included force and the use of a sword. If being a jailer was inherently incompatible with following Christ, wouldn’t Paul have likely told him before baptizing him as part of “counting the cost” of serving Christ?
We see a similar example in Luke 3:14, where John the Baptist instructs soldiers not to leave the military, but to act with integrity: “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.” Rather than condemning their occupation, he calls them to be righteous within it.
Also, in Romans 13:4, Paul refers to civil authorities as “God’s servant” who carries out justice. While Christians are personally called to non-retaliation (Romans 12), Paul does not prohibit participation in government roles. In fact, Erastus, a Christian brother that Paul mentions in Romans 16:23, served as a city treasurer. This is evidence that early Christians could hold civic office.
One further concern I have is that your position seems to imply that when Paul describes governing officials as “God’s servants” in Romans 13, they must necessarily be non-Christians, since you believe Christians are to refrain from all use of coercive authority. That raises a difficult question: why would God entrust such serious moral responsibility to unbelievers but exclude his own people from serving conscientiously in those roles? If Christians are shaped by Jesus’ love, mercy, and humility, wouldn’t those be the very qualities we’d want in those entrusted with justice and public order?
I respect your desire to faithfully live out Jesus’ call to peace. At the same time, let's be careful not to infer more than the text actually teaches. I believe there is room for Christians to serve conscientiously in public roles that restrain evil and uphold justice as “God’s servants” so long as they do so with humility, compassion, and a clear conscience before God.
Good thoughts, brother. Just a few counterpoints to consider:
1. The Philippian Jailer’s situation needs the same word of caution as Cornelius’ situation. We have to be careful not to make an argument from silence. We cannot assume since the text does not state how his life needed to change after becoming a Christian that there were no changes that needed to be made. We can’t use the jailer as an example of someone who continued working a government job, since the text doesn’t actually say that.
2. John’s words to the Jewish soldiers, in preparation for Jesus’ arrival, is a bit different than Jesus’ teaching about how to live in the kingdom. I think we have to be careful not to conflate the ministry of John and the ministry of Jesus. When Jesus rose from the grave and ascended to the throne, the Messianic age began and a lot of things changed. I plan to say more on this soon.
3. Rulers like Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar were servants of God, bringing God’s wrath and punishment on the world. However, we have to be careful not to assume that what they were doing was “good.” They were eventually punished even for the violence God allowed them to carry out as part of fulfilling his divine will. Lots of interesting prophetic texts on that subject. More than we can delve into here.
Finally, I’m not personally opposed to all government involvement by Christians. I don’t go as far as someone like David Lipscomb. For me, it really comes down to the violence issue.
Christ was viciously murdered largely because he did not in the least behave in accordance with corrupted human conduct and expectation—and in particular because he was nowhere near being the angry and sometimes even bloodthirsty behemoth so many theists seemingly wanted or needed their Creator and savior to be and therefore believed he’d have to be.
Christ’s nature and teachings even left John the Baptist, who believed in him as the savior, bewildered by his apparently contradictory version of the Hebraic messiah, with which John had been raised. Perhaps most perplexing was the Biblical Jesus’ revolutionary teaching of non-violently offering the other cheek as the proper response to being physically assaulted by one’s enemy. The Biblical Jesus also most profoundly washed his disciples’ feet, the act clearly revealing that he took corporeal form to serve.
Perhaps some ‘Christians’ even find inconvenient, if not plainly annoying, trying to reconcile the conspicuous inconsistency in the fundamental nature of the New Testament’s Jesus with the wrathful, vengeful and even jealous nature of the Old Testament’s God. But for many of us, Godly greatness need not be defined as the ability to destroy and harshly punish, as opposed to the willingness and compacity for compassionate forgiveness, non-violence and humility.
... Morally speaking, the citizenry collectively deserve far better than always having either the usual callous establishment conservative or neo/faux liberal government. But, regardless of who’s elected prime minister or president , we in the Far West live in a virtual corpocracy. An insidiously covert rule by way of potently manipulative/persuasive corporate and big-monied lobbyists.
The more they make, all the more they want — nay, need! — to make next quarterly. It’s never enough, yet the corporate news-media, which make up virtually all of Western mainstream news media, will implicitly or explicitly celebrate their successful greed [a.k.a. ‘stock market gains’].
A few social/labor uprisings or revolutions notwithstanding, it seems the superfluously rich and powerful have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their big-money/-power interests, even over the basic needs of the masses, to the very end.
Even in modern (supposed) democracies, the police and military can, and perhaps would, claim—using euphemistic or political terminology, of course—they have/had to bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations, especially those against economic injustices. Indirectly supported by a complacent, if not compliant, corporate news-media, which is virtually all mainstream news-media, the absurdly unjust inequities/inequalities can persist.
Perhaps there were/are lessons learned from those successful social/labor uprisings, with the clarity of hindsight, by more-contemporary big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses (a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, maybe)?
1. You have repeatedly asserted that violence is wrong without, in my view, proving the case biblically.
For example, in our discussion on your post about protecting others, you stated, “…we would all acknowledge that ensuring someone's physical safety is limited to what is right, legal, ethical, etc. John wouldn't be justified in stealing in order to feed Mary, simply because he had a responsibility to care for her. So, we shouldn't assume that caring for her would include killing someone who threatened her well-being.”
(Not to put too fine a point on it, but your argument is that violence of any kind - not just killing someone - is always wrong. Also the Biblical prohibition is against murder - not against all killing).
Similarly, in this post, the Proverbs passage you quoted explicitly addresses “wicked men,” which you seem to conflate with violent men. In doing so, you imply that to use violence is necessarily to be wicked.
Then, in quoting Romans 12, again you have prejudged that “overcoming evil with good” could not possibly include committing violence, in any context for any reason.
All this begs the question because you are asserting precisely the thing you’re attempting to prove (i.e., committing violence is always wrong). You haven’t yet shown, in my view, that Scripture teaches that violence is always wrong.
——
Romans 13:4 states that a ruler “is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
Paul draws a moral distinction between the wrongdoer and the one who brings God’s wrath (righteous judgment) with the sword. Per your line of reasoning, however, both would be wrongdoers, making Paul’s teaching - and by extension, God Himself - hypocritical. Paul sees a moral difference in the violence of the lawbreaker and the violence of the one whom God sends to restrain him - so should we. You can argue that it’s a never-ending cycle (and I’d be inclined to agree with you), but I think you overstate the case in attempting to draw a moral equivalence between the two.
——
Finally, calling the police against a violent offender is very likely to result in that person experiencing potentially lethal violence. So, in calling the police, haven’t you facilitated evil by putting your lawbreaking neighbor in harm’s way? And isn’t that simply a way of outsourcing the messiness of life in a fallen world? I also prefer that other people handle certain tough/dangerous people and situations on my behalf. But I only get to keep my hands clean because someone else does the dirty work. I couldn’t then feel that I have behaved virtuously. And wouldn’t it be hypocritical for me to thank the police officer for rescuing me while also criticizing him for having committed violence?
If any kind of violence is always wrong and we should do everything in our power not to use it against someone else, neither should we incite someone else to do it on our behalf.
Hey, my brother, thank you again for sharing your thoughts. Let me see if I can respond in a helpful way. As always, I hope this comes across in a respectful and kind way. I don’t want my response to seem rude or defensive at all.
First, my goal is not to prove that all violence is “wrong.” There have been plenty of times when violence was justifiable for certain people in certain places. My goal, since the beginning of this series, is to defend the historic Christian position since Christ now reigns as King, those who belong to him are called to love their enemies; and loving enemies precludes doing violence to them.
Paul said it this way, “Love does no harm to a neighbor” (Romans 13:10). In that same chapter, Paul says that earthly governments punish people by wielding the sword. Christians, on the other hand, are to love everyone and loving people precludes harming them. This is why I believe when Paul says, in the same context, that Christians are to overcome evil (Gr. “kakos” - which can mean harmful or injurious) with good, he means that we overcome without doing harm to people. The whole context there Paul is talking about blessing our enemies, feeding them when they are hungry, and never retaliating against them in kind. The “good” Paul is describing is materially beneficial to enemies, therefore, it is inherently nonviolent.
I’m sorry I didn’t spell all that out that in the post; perhaps I should have. But I do believe Romans 12:14-13:10 teaches exactly this point, Christians are not supposed to participate in the cycle of violence. I don’t think this is hypocritical at all. I think it is similar to the point Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 5. It is not the place of Christians to punish the world for their evil. God handles that. And, according to Romans 13, sometimes God handles that through the sword of the rulers. Similar to what Paul rhetorically asked the Corinthians, “what business is it of [ours] to judge those outside the church?” God handles the world’s crimes. It’s not our place to punish criminals, that’s the place of God (often through governments).
Again, I don’t want to conflate or equate all violence with one another. That is not what I’m trying to do at all. I’m sorry it came across that way. However, the Bible presents violence as a cycle. This theme goes all the way back to Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Shedding blood leads to shedding of blood, which leads to more shedding of blood, and the cycle continues until someone breaks that cycle.
For those living as part of this current age, the cycle continues. For us, however, I believe Jesus has broken the cycle through his own death. And we have died with him, so that we have been freed from the need to retaliate, or even the need to fear our own deaths. Now that we are free from these things, we can love our enemies, bless them, and do good to them. Those who are still subject to death do not have this freedom.
I do not expect the world to love their enemies and not fear their deaths. That would be a completely unrealistic expectation. Only Spirit-filled, transformed, followers of Jesus can live this sort of life. God bless you, my brother. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and willingness to engage this conversation in good faith. May our Lord continue to bless you and your work in his kingdom for his glory.
How does Luke 22: 35-38 and Matthew 8:5-13 fit into this context?
Not sure if you've had a chance to read the rest of the series (https://www.radicallychristian.com/t/nonviolence), but I actually talked about Luke 22 in Part 4 of the series.
Would you mind clarifying your question on Matthew 8:5-13? I'm not sure what you're asking, brother. So sorry.
In Matthew 8:5-13 we have the account of the Centurion with great faith. Jesus even commented on his faith. BUT Jesus did not tell the Centurion to leave the Roman Legion or call out his military service as something he shouldn’t be doing.
Likewise, in Luke 3:14 we see: “Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?” He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” Again, Jesus had the opportunity to tell the soldiers what they were doing was wrong, but he didn’t. He merely gave them some guide rails to use in their military service. I think that we need to be encouraging qualified Christians to pursue military service. I think we need conscientious Christians providing Christian guide rails to the troops they serve with and for.
Also Luke 3:14
I actually covered this in Part Four as well https://www.radicallychristian.com/p/not-peace-but-a-sword-matthew-1034
Wes, thank you for this thoughtful and gracious article. I deeply appreciate your commitment to following Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence and your respectful tone toward those who serve or have served in the military and law enforcement.
That said, I’m not fully persuaded that Scripture requires Christians to abstain from all roles involving state authority or the use of force. One example that gives me pause is the Philippian jailer in Acts 16. After his dramatic conversion, he is baptized that same night, yet there’s no indication that Paul instructed him to resign his post, even though his duties included force and the use of a sword. If being a jailer was inherently incompatible with following Christ, wouldn’t Paul have likely told him before baptizing him as part of “counting the cost” of serving Christ?
We see a similar example in Luke 3:14, where John the Baptist instructs soldiers not to leave the military, but to act with integrity: “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.” Rather than condemning their occupation, he calls them to be righteous within it.
Also, in Romans 13:4, Paul refers to civil authorities as “God’s servant” who carries out justice. While Christians are personally called to non-retaliation (Romans 12), Paul does not prohibit participation in government roles. In fact, Erastus, a Christian brother that Paul mentions in Romans 16:23, served as a city treasurer. This is evidence that early Christians could hold civic office.
One further concern I have is that your position seems to imply that when Paul describes governing officials as “God’s servants” in Romans 13, they must necessarily be non-Christians, since you believe Christians are to refrain from all use of coercive authority. That raises a difficult question: why would God entrust such serious moral responsibility to unbelievers but exclude his own people from serving conscientiously in those roles? If Christians are shaped by Jesus’ love, mercy, and humility, wouldn’t those be the very qualities we’d want in those entrusted with justice and public order?
I respect your desire to faithfully live out Jesus’ call to peace. At the same time, let's be careful not to infer more than the text actually teaches. I believe there is room for Christians to serve conscientiously in public roles that restrain evil and uphold justice as “God’s servants” so long as they do so with humility, compassion, and a clear conscience before God.
Good thoughts, brother. Just a few counterpoints to consider:
1. The Philippian Jailer’s situation needs the same word of caution as Cornelius’ situation. We have to be careful not to make an argument from silence. We cannot assume since the text does not state how his life needed to change after becoming a Christian that there were no changes that needed to be made. We can’t use the jailer as an example of someone who continued working a government job, since the text doesn’t actually say that.
2. John’s words to the Jewish soldiers, in preparation for Jesus’ arrival, is a bit different than Jesus’ teaching about how to live in the kingdom. I think we have to be careful not to conflate the ministry of John and the ministry of Jesus. When Jesus rose from the grave and ascended to the throne, the Messianic age began and a lot of things changed. I plan to say more on this soon.
3. Rulers like Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar were servants of God, bringing God’s wrath and punishment on the world. However, we have to be careful not to assume that what they were doing was “good.” They were eventually punished even for the violence God allowed them to carry out as part of fulfilling his divine will. Lots of interesting prophetic texts on that subject. More than we can delve into here.
Finally, I’m not personally opposed to all government involvement by Christians. I don’t go as far as someone like David Lipscomb. For me, it really comes down to the violence issue.
Christ was viciously murdered largely because he did not in the least behave in accordance with corrupted human conduct and expectation—and in particular because he was nowhere near being the angry and sometimes even bloodthirsty behemoth so many theists seemingly wanted or needed their Creator and savior to be and therefore believed he’d have to be.
Christ’s nature and teachings even left John the Baptist, who believed in him as the savior, bewildered by his apparently contradictory version of the Hebraic messiah, with which John had been raised. Perhaps most perplexing was the Biblical Jesus’ revolutionary teaching of non-violently offering the other cheek as the proper response to being physically assaulted by one’s enemy. The Biblical Jesus also most profoundly washed his disciples’ feet, the act clearly revealing that he took corporeal form to serve.
Perhaps some ‘Christians’ even find inconvenient, if not plainly annoying, trying to reconcile the conspicuous inconsistency in the fundamental nature of the New Testament’s Jesus with the wrathful, vengeful and even jealous nature of the Old Testament’s God. But for many of us, Godly greatness need not be defined as the ability to destroy and harshly punish, as opposed to the willingness and compacity for compassionate forgiveness, non-violence and humility.
... Morally speaking, the citizenry collectively deserve far better than always having either the usual callous establishment conservative or neo/faux liberal government. But, regardless of who’s elected prime minister or president , we in the Far West live in a virtual corpocracy. An insidiously covert rule by way of potently manipulative/persuasive corporate and big-monied lobbyists.
The more they make, all the more they want — nay, need! — to make next quarterly. It’s never enough, yet the corporate news-media, which make up virtually all of Western mainstream news media, will implicitly or explicitly celebrate their successful greed [a.k.a. ‘stock market gains’].
A few social/labor uprisings or revolutions notwithstanding, it seems the superfluously rich and powerful have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their big-money/-power interests, even over the basic needs of the masses, to the very end.
Even in modern (supposed) democracies, the police and military can, and perhaps would, claim—using euphemistic or political terminology, of course—they have/had to bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority during major demonstrations, especially those against economic injustices. Indirectly supported by a complacent, if not compliant, corporate news-media, which is virtually all mainstream news-media, the absurdly unjust inequities/inequalities can persist.
Perhaps there were/are lessons learned from those successful social/labor uprisings, with the clarity of hindsight, by more-contemporary big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses (a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, maybe)?
I see where you’re coming from.
A few things I’d like to point out:
1. You have repeatedly asserted that violence is wrong without, in my view, proving the case biblically.
For example, in our discussion on your post about protecting others, you stated, “…we would all acknowledge that ensuring someone's physical safety is limited to what is right, legal, ethical, etc. John wouldn't be justified in stealing in order to feed Mary, simply because he had a responsibility to care for her. So, we shouldn't assume that caring for her would include killing someone who threatened her well-being.”
(Not to put too fine a point on it, but your argument is that violence of any kind - not just killing someone - is always wrong. Also the Biblical prohibition is against murder - not against all killing).
Similarly, in this post, the Proverbs passage you quoted explicitly addresses “wicked men,” which you seem to conflate with violent men. In doing so, you imply that to use violence is necessarily to be wicked.
Then, in quoting Romans 12, again you have prejudged that “overcoming evil with good” could not possibly include committing violence, in any context for any reason.
All this begs the question because you are asserting precisely the thing you’re attempting to prove (i.e., committing violence is always wrong). You haven’t yet shown, in my view, that Scripture teaches that violence is always wrong.
——
Romans 13:4 states that a ruler “is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
Paul draws a moral distinction between the wrongdoer and the one who brings God’s wrath (righteous judgment) with the sword. Per your line of reasoning, however, both would be wrongdoers, making Paul’s teaching - and by extension, God Himself - hypocritical. Paul sees a moral difference in the violence of the lawbreaker and the violence of the one whom God sends to restrain him - so should we. You can argue that it’s a never-ending cycle (and I’d be inclined to agree with you), but I think you overstate the case in attempting to draw a moral equivalence between the two.
——
Finally, calling the police against a violent offender is very likely to result in that person experiencing potentially lethal violence. So, in calling the police, haven’t you facilitated evil by putting your lawbreaking neighbor in harm’s way? And isn’t that simply a way of outsourcing the messiness of life in a fallen world? I also prefer that other people handle certain tough/dangerous people and situations on my behalf. But I only get to keep my hands clean because someone else does the dirty work. I couldn’t then feel that I have behaved virtuously. And wouldn’t it be hypocritical for me to thank the police officer for rescuing me while also criticizing him for having committed violence?
If any kind of violence is always wrong and we should do everything in our power not to use it against someone else, neither should we incite someone else to do it on our behalf.
Hey, my brother, thank you again for sharing your thoughts. Let me see if I can respond in a helpful way. As always, I hope this comes across in a respectful and kind way. I don’t want my response to seem rude or defensive at all.
First, my goal is not to prove that all violence is “wrong.” There have been plenty of times when violence was justifiable for certain people in certain places. My goal, since the beginning of this series, is to defend the historic Christian position since Christ now reigns as King, those who belong to him are called to love their enemies; and loving enemies precludes doing violence to them.
Paul said it this way, “Love does no harm to a neighbor” (Romans 13:10). In that same chapter, Paul says that earthly governments punish people by wielding the sword. Christians, on the other hand, are to love everyone and loving people precludes harming them. This is why I believe when Paul says, in the same context, that Christians are to overcome evil (Gr. “kakos” - which can mean harmful or injurious) with good, he means that we overcome without doing harm to people. The whole context there Paul is talking about blessing our enemies, feeding them when they are hungry, and never retaliating against them in kind. The “good” Paul is describing is materially beneficial to enemies, therefore, it is inherently nonviolent.
I’m sorry I didn’t spell all that out that in the post; perhaps I should have. But I do believe Romans 12:14-13:10 teaches exactly this point, Christians are not supposed to participate in the cycle of violence. I don’t think this is hypocritical at all. I think it is similar to the point Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 5. It is not the place of Christians to punish the world for their evil. God handles that. And, according to Romans 13, sometimes God handles that through the sword of the rulers. Similar to what Paul rhetorically asked the Corinthians, “what business is it of [ours] to judge those outside the church?” God handles the world’s crimes. It’s not our place to punish criminals, that’s the place of God (often through governments).
Again, I don’t want to conflate or equate all violence with one another. That is not what I’m trying to do at all. I’m sorry it came across that way. However, the Bible presents violence as a cycle. This theme goes all the way back to Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Shedding blood leads to shedding of blood, which leads to more shedding of blood, and the cycle continues until someone breaks that cycle.
For those living as part of this current age, the cycle continues. For us, however, I believe Jesus has broken the cycle through his own death. And we have died with him, so that we have been freed from the need to retaliate, or even the need to fear our own deaths. Now that we are free from these things, we can love our enemies, bless them, and do good to them. Those who are still subject to death do not have this freedom.
I do not expect the world to love their enemies and not fear their deaths. That would be a completely unrealistic expectation. Only Spirit-filled, transformed, followers of Jesus can live this sort of life. God bless you, my brother. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and willingness to engage this conversation in good faith. May our Lord continue to bless you and your work in his kingdom for his glory.